Pixel City: Computer-generated City

Topic

Pixel City is a procedurally-generated city by Shamus Young. For the non-coders out there, this essentially means that based on a certain set of rules, this 3-D city is generated dynamically each time the program runs. Here, the video that shows the Young’s process will make it more clear:

Check out the very detailed 10-part explanation for more on how Pixel City was built. Hopefully more comes out of it than just a screensaver. If it does become a screensaver though, I’d gladly use it.

i agree that most of our cities are badly designed -but I think pixel city just shows that our cities are assembled on the aggregate based on basic rules -from the macro: zoning, FAR, height restrictions, to the micro: building codes, materials standards, etc.

If anything the exercise points to the need for better rules to make better cities.

That is really well done. There are many papers on the subject, sure. But besides all that, it is always hard to make it work, make it look good AND make it easy to understand. You have done all these things very well, and good on you.

That’s a PC demo where textures/geometry/sounds are procedurally generated, it does involve city stuff, buildings, roads, brigde etc. They also tried to get the smallest binary possible,
the whole(directX based) thing is 177k.
Enjoy.

Great job but It lacks some realism in that I don’t know of any city that is all modern buildings. I live in Chicago and I think the number of modern/newish bldgs concentrated in the downtown area is probably not more than 2 or 3 dozen, though it seems like a lot more.

This would be great for SimCity. One of the biggest problems that people have in that game is that they get weird looking cities because the same buildings pop up again and again. This could solve that problem.